Abstract-In this paper we address the issues of timeliness and transmission reliability of existing industrial communication standards. We combine a Forward Error Correction coding scheme on the Medium Access Control layer with a lightweight routing protocol to form an IEEE 802.15.4-conformable solution, which can be implemented into already existing hardware without violating the standard. After laying the theoretical foundations, we conduct a performance evaluation of the proposed solution. The results show a substantial gain in reliability and reduced latency, compared to the uncoded transmissions, as well as common Wireless Sensor Network routing protocols.
I. INTRODUCTIONThe research efforts to introduce Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) into Process Automation (PA) have produced three major industrial communication standards: WirelessHART [1], ISA100.11a [2] and WIA-PA [3]. The solutions based on these specifications shall satisfy the stringent performance requirements of PA applications and collect the sensor data in a reliable and timely manner. Nevertheless, a number of field tests, such as [4], reveal the fact that high communication reliability and real time performance can hardly be achieved. Some downsides of the existing solutions are worth mentioning. Routing protocols encountered in existing industrial communication standards are overcomplicated. Path failures in a dynamic environment (such as industrial) are frequent, triggering tedious path recalculation processes, during which transmission of data traffic is put on hold. Control message overhead is a natural side effect in such an environment, and exchange of routing tables, beacons and other control messages consumes bandwidth; Error Control and Correction: industrial communication standards do not approach the problem of error control in a preemptive manner. Instead, packet retransmissions are employed, which may boost the data latency in the network and deliver outdated data to the sink. Consequently, rethinking of current designs deserves consideration.Flooding is the most rudimentary routing technique and flooding-based algorithms are often seen as a way to simplify data dissemination in WSNs. Traditional flooding approaches suffer from broadcast storm and energy inefficiency problems, which were thoroughly studied in [5] and [6]. The floodingbased schemes presented in [7], [8], [9] and [10] are designed for broadcast traffic. However, the aim of this work is to simplify sensor data collection, rather than point-to-multipoint communication. Flooding-based routing schemes encountered